San Francisco: The global artificial intelligence industry has entered a new phase of competition as SpaceXAI and OpenAI announced major advancements in their AI offerings, with both companies focusing on improving performance, efficiency and user interaction. While SpaceXAI introduced its latest flagship language model, Grok 4.5, OpenAI unveiled a new generation of voice-based AI models designed to deliver more natural and seamless conversations.
SpaceXAI’s Grok 4.5 marks the company’s first major AI launch since becoming a publicly traded firm. The model has been developed to handle a wide range of tasks, including coding, software development, research, writing and general knowledge work. According to the company, Grok 4.5 delivers nearly twice the token efficiency of several competing AI models, enabling developers and businesses to reduce operational costs while maintaining strong performance.
Founder Elon Musk described Grok 4.5 as an “Opus-class model,” comparing it with Anthropic’s advanced Opus family of large language models. He said the new system offers performance comparable to Opus 4.7 while providing faster response times at significantly lower pricing. SpaceXAI has priced Grok 4.5 at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, substantially below Anthropic’s Opus 4.7 pricing of $5 per million input tokens and $25 per million output tokens. The company also released benchmark results indicating competitive performance across multiple AI evaluations, although it stopped short of claiming category-leading results in every benchmark.
Meanwhile, OpenAI has shifted its attention toward making voice interactions with AI feel more human. The company announced GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 Mini, two conversational models that use full-duplex technology, allowing the AI to listen and speak simultaneously instead of relying on separate speech recognition and text-to-speech systems.
This advancement enables users to interrupt conversations naturally, supports live translation and facilitates longer hands-free interactions. OpenAI also said the models can remain silent while processing context before responding, creating a more realistic conversational experience. GPT-Live-1 Mini will replace ChatGPT’s existing Advanced Voice Mode by default, while paid subscribers will have access to the more capable GPT-Live-1 model.
OpenAI further demonstrated the models’ ability to display visual information during conversations and integrate with the company’s latest reasoning and search systems. The company noted that more than 150 million users already rely on ChatGPT’s voice features, underscoring its belief that voice-based interaction could become the primary interface for AI in the future as competition in the sector continues to accelerate.
